Synesthesia and the Fusion of the Arts. Martin Ray and Stephen Bates.

A program of photographs, haiku, and clarinet compositions originating from Halibut Point.

Friday evening, April 12, 7:30 at the home of Stephen and Isabella Bates, 2 Masconomo Street, Manchester. Seating 60. Reservations required, (978) 526-1443 or clarone@comcast.net.  Admission is free. Donate $20 at the door to the Gloucester Writers Center, receive a signed copy of Martin Ray’s Quarry Scrolls, photographs and haiku from Halibut Point. Presented with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

We experience Synesthesia when one sense stimulates another, a source of creative pleasure that can be heightened, liberated, and channeled in diverse ways. In the Fusion of the Arts we seek to enjoy a conversational interplay of forms and responses to underlying aesthetic awareness.

Upon retirement from his career as a Cape Ann landscape gardener, Martin Ray brought his focus to the natural and social history of Halibut Point, where he has composed nearly three hundred weekly blog essays. His recent book Quarry Scrolls, which generated tonight’s program, is drawn from his Halibut Point photographs and meditations in haiku. Martin has also published Cape Ann Narratives of Art in Life featuring contemporary creativity.

Stephen Bates deepened his integration of the arts during his career as clarinetist for the Opera House Orchestra of the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., where he made paintings exploring the relationship between art and music, particularly inspired by Kandinsky and Scriabin. Since moving to Manchester with his wife Isabella in 2009, Stephen has increasingly applied his innovations to sculpture, and to teaching silk painting at the Ten Pound Studio in Gloucester.